First US made streetcar in years unveiled

Oregon Iron Works has produced the first American made streetcar since the 1960's. Portland has placed an order for six of the streetcars, while Tuscon, AZ has placed an order for seven more. I think this is a great move by the Oregon Iron Works, especially since now is a time when people are demanding green technologies and "Made in America" products.


After the closing of the GM plant in Janesville, all I hear on the news is how GM back stabbed us or how Janesville's economy is going to plummet, just basically feeling sorry for ourselves. Why don't we do something positive with the factory, did we really think that a large SUV assembly line would be economically viable in the future? Is it really that hard to think in the future in stead of in the now? We should follow Oregon's lead and start producing streetcars or commuter trains or even "high" speed trains. I'm sure Bombardier or Siemens would love to help us start a local manufactoring plant in Janesville, we have the work force all we need is the work.

Vacation

Hey Everybody,

I'm going on vacation for a week and a half. While I'm gone, be sure to check out The Infrastructurist and The Transport Politic. Both are very good sites for news on trains and infrastructure.

LaHood in Spain

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood is finishing up a trip to Europe to examine their use of high speed rail. He vised the countries of Germany (Deutsch Bahn), France (SNCF), and Spain (Renfe). It's good to see that our leaders are looking to other countries to see how we should model our system, I would also like to point out that Ray LaHood is just following in Gov. Doyle's footsteps.

From my experiences in Germany and their train system, here is what I hope Mr.LaHood takes away from his trip to Europe:

1. The majority of passenger rail should be state run. This allows for more profitable routes to subsidize less popular routes, making sure that everyone and everyplace is included by the rail system. There is a great article over on the Transport Politic debating public versus private ownership, it can be found here.

2. Each country has there own engineering companies helping build the railways and the trains. Germany has Siemens and some parts of Bombardier, France has Alstom (all three produce trains), and Spain has ACS which builds the tracks. The U.S. needs its own rail company to build our equipment. Why can't GM build trains? The U.S. government now has a 60% stake in the company, so we'll see if that leads to anything. Although, initially we may have to purchase rail equipment from Europe just like Russia and China have done, since the European companies are so far ahead of the U.S. in rail technology.

3. High speed rail is going to need a lot more money. I'll just leave this one to a graph:

UW Madison Students Promoting Rail in Wisconsin

Found this article on the Wisconsin Radio Network. It's good to see students taking a proactive approach to encouraging rail in Wisconsin. The student group is called "WISPRIG Advance Public Transit", whose facebook page can be found here. WISPRIG stands for WISconsin Public Research Interest Group. Also, it is nice to see students advocating for rail since they are a significant portion of train ridership. Hopefully the federal government with send some of the $8 billion marked for rail to the Midwest to help fund this rail link, I haven't heard an exact date on this, but from what I hear it could be announced as early as late summer.

Go Student Rail Groups! The more talk the better.

Blueprint America: Road to the Future

On May 20th, PBS aired a documentary on the transportation infrastructure in the US. It highlighted the cities of Denver, Portland, and New York City. I was very impressed with the video, which can be found here. The documentary focused more on the mind set of transportation and less on the technical aspects. One of the questions of the documentary was, how do you combat sprawl? (Although I would have liked to see more on while sprawl is bad for us). In Denver, the city decided to build a highway or "belt-way" around the city. This helped lead Denver to be, at one point, the third most congested city in America with many days deemed too polluted to be outside. Portland chose a different route. Instead of building an expressway through town, they decided to put the money towards transit including light rail and biking. Now Portland is one of the most attractive places to live in the U.S.

All in all, I highly recommend watching it.

Couple notes:
-Oregon Iron Works is building the first street car in America in over many decades
-I believe Denver is slowing turning itself around with investments in light rail

NPR on Trains

On the recommendation of my mom, I listened to a segment from NPR Wisconsin on the future of trains in America. The first half of the segment is a talk with Phillip Longman, Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation. Author, “The Next Progressive Era: A Blueprint for Broad Prosperity.” He talked about putting more freight on trains and how there are issues in Chicago (watch the video below from PBS on the issues in Chicago). The second half of the segment was a talk with Simon Montague, Director of Corporate Communications, Eurostar high-speed passenger train in the UK and Europe. He discusses how high speed rail in Europe is competing well with the planes and roads.

A link to the talk is here, and I suggest watching this picture slide show of HSR from Flickr while listening to the talk.

Why should you care about infastructure?

As I have mentioned before, PBS is doing a brilliant series called "Blueprint America" which looks at the different aspects (esp. cost and needs) of the infrastructure of America. A nice video explaining what they are doing can be found here.

On May 20th at 9pm (central time), PBS will air a documentary called "Road to the Future." If it is anything like the previous segments for blueprint America, it will be a good, informative show. From the preview it looks like it will emphasize on the effects of urban sprawl and how we can handle it.